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New Toolkit for Local Affiliates to Improve & Maintain Organizational Diversity

New Toolkit for Local Affiliates to Improve & Maintain Organizational Diversity

Pieces of the Diversity Puzzle: TYLA’s New Toolkit for Local Affiliates to Improve & Maintain Organizational Diversity
By: Michael J. Ritter

This past month, TYLA released its newest project, the Diversity Toolkit, to help local affiliates address issues of organizational diversity. As reflected by the Toolkit’s four flyer-style push-cards, “organizational diversity” refers to the comprehensive representation of various interests that fall under the general umbrella of an organization’s mission or purposes. The primary goal of organizational diversity is to strengthen the organization in its leadership, membership, and activities. This strength is derived from a variety of perspectives and experiences that inform the organization’s activities.

Organizations can tend to trend toward homogeneity; bar associations, including local affiliates, are no exception. It is natural for a board or committee to play to its strengths and develop programming that relates to the particular backgrounds of the board’s or committee’s members. Such programming will tend to attract lawyers with similar backgrounds as those board or committee members. It is also natural for bar leaders to look to coworkers and friends when trying to increase membership and members’ involvement in the association. And the members who are more involved in an association generally become the association’s leaders. One potential consequence is that a bar association’s leadership, membership, and activities can become homogenous.

There is no simple solution. Improving and maintaining diversity requires making efforts in addition to those of running all aspects of an organization and its activities. TYLA’s Diversity Toolkit can help local affiliates improve and maintain organizational diversity by providing ideas for where to start. The Toolkit consists of several pieces of the puzzle of having a comprehensive approach to organizational diversity. The four push-cards relate to diversifying relationships, diversifying membership, improving diversity with policies, and improving diversity with projects.

1. Diversifying Affiliates’ Relationships: This push-card provides examples of how to successfully partner and cross-promote with other organizations (including other local affiliates, big bars, and affinity bars). Such cross-promotion and collaboration can help introduce your members to members of other organizations and help diversify your affiliate’s activities.

2. Diversifying Membership: This push-card discusses numerous ways to increase the diversity of the membership of your local affiliate. Diversifying membership is not easy, but options for solving the puzzle include making efforts to reach out to your membership, considering options to include generally non-participating members, creating a leadership institute, and utilizing resources provided by the State Bar of Texas Office of Minority Affairs.

3. Improving Diversity with Policies: This push-card focuses on policies and bylaw amendments that could be used to improve and maintain organizational diversity. It specifically addresses how to keep diversity a topic of discussion within the association, and provides specific examples of policy and bylaw language that local affiliates could adopt to implement a non-discrimination policy or add an at-large director to their board.

4. Improving Diversity with Projects: This push-card provides examples and explanations of diversity projects that have been successful. The diversity projects in this push-card have been and are implemented by TYLA and other local affiliates. A good resource for additional ideas for diversity projects is the TYLA Annual Report, which reports the local affiliate projects that have won awards from TYLA.

Michael J. Ritter is a board-certified staff attorney at the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio. He is a TYLA at-large director and president of the San Antonio LGBT Bar Association. He can be reached by email.


Views and opinions expressed in eNews are those of their authors and not necessarily those of the Texas Young Lawyers Association or the State Bar of Texas.

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